Research chief

Jean-Pierre Bourguignon of France has been appointed president of the European Research Council (ERC), the EU’s main funding body for frontier research.

Bourguignon, a mathematician, will take over from Helga Nowotny, an Austrian sociologist, on 1 January 2014 for a four-year term that is renewable once.

Bourguignon is a long-standing fellow of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). He was a professor at the École polytechnique in 1986-2012; in 1990-92 he served as president of the Société Mathématique de France and in 1995-98 as president of the European Mathematical Society.

He will be the first ERC president to be based in Brussels, as the presidency now carries close to full-time responsibilities.

The ERC manages a budget of more than €13 billion under Horizon 2020, the EU’s programme for research and innovation in 2014-20 – up close to 60% from the current budget cycle.